I’m in the process of deGoogling and also shoring up my email privacy, which means I’m hyper aware of mistakes I make, hence the stupid question:

I was testing something with Proton Mail and misspelled the domain—swapped the “r” with one of the neighboring letters.

I didn’t get an email bounceback, which is fine, because you don’t always get a bounceback anyway. But, should I be concerned that I might have just volunteered my email directly to some spam outfit?

The “wrong” domain is registered. I’m acutely aware that the misspelling being one letter away from “Proton” might be intentional to capture misspellings like the one I made. Also, the wrong domain seems to be associated with oopatet.com and trellian.com, which are blocked by ublock.

Is there anything I should do from a privacy perspective?
Or is this a non-issue?

  • parrottail@sh.itjust.works
    3·
    1 year ago

    I’ve got a slightly different tale regarding privacy & emails misspellings. I have an email account that is first.last@domain.com and while my name isn’t particularly common there are at least 7-8 different people across the world with my name who have on more than one occasion had emails sent to me by mistake (by the namesakes as well as by others). I’ve never used what was sent to me maliciously, but I have on occasion tried to track down my namesakes to let them know of the error. I’ve been successful a couple of times, and know a few things that might be a little sensitive. I’ve managed to find the ‘correct’ email addresses of a couple of my namesakes & will forward things on when I’m certain who it’s supposed to go to. My email address has been the recovery email for power bills, employers, dating sites, and a few other sites. Now imagine what could happen if I weren’t the stand-up citizen that I am.